Meat Loaf with Home Fried Potato Cubes

This time, I cooked a dish which is very popular in Europe, especially in Germany or Switzerland. Since I had always thought that it was pretty laborious, I had hesitated to try it. But again, it’s quite the opposite and after cooking it, I can’t understand the fuss some people make of it.

The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that the cooking process takes quite a while, so it’s best if you plan ahead, in case that you want to prepare it.

Ingredients (for 3 to 4 persons, the meat loaf will probably be enough for 2 meals):

• 750g minced beef meat
• 550g minced chicken meat
• 3 shallots
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 toast slices
• 250ml of milk
• 30g flour
• Salt
• Pepper
• Ground Paprika
• Curry powder
• 2 eggs
• Dried or fresh rosemary
• 7 middle sized potatoes
• 250ml chicken or vegetable stock
• Oil

Preparation:

Peel the garlic and the shallots and cut everything in very small pieces, because we don’t want to have garlic or shallot chunks inside our meat loaf. You can also use a food processor for that. Peel the onion, too, but just cut it in half and then quarter the two halves.

Next, pour the milk into a small bowl. Cut the outside borders off the toast slices and tear them in pieces which aren’t too small but fit inside the bowl. Press the toast pieces down so that they are covered with milk and soak the milk up. Let the toast rest inside the milk for about 10 minutes at room temperature.

Prepare a glass or porcelain cooking dish (of course one that can be put inside the oven!) by either buttering its bottom or adding a bit of oil.

You may be wanting to wear gloves for the rest of the preparation process, as you will be touching raw meat.

Place the minced meat inside a quite big bowl. Form a bit of a pit where you can fill in the other ingredients in the middle of the minced meat. Now, we take the toast out of the milk and squeeze it a bit so that we won’t have too much liquid inside our meat loaf. Place the toast inside the “pit” in the minced meat and add the eggs, too. Now, start “kneading” the meat loaf. This is easiest, if you take just your right hand (of course your left hand, if you’re left-handed), grab over the “pit” and inside the minced meat and squish everything that you have in your hand until it gets squeezed through your fingers. Repeat this process until you have an almost uniform mixture of meat, eggs and toast.

Now, after every squishing, add some of the prepared spices to your mixture and continue to “knead” well until everything has become incorporated in the meat loaf. Since you shouldn’t taste the mixture before it’s cooked because of the raw meat, you have to rely on your seasoning experience as far as the herbs and spices are concerned.

I normally like it zesty, that means that I use a lot of spices, with one exception, salt! First of all, if you use too much salt, the whole dish can be ruined and second, if you don’t use much, usually you won’t taste it anymore after the cooking process. So I add just a little and in case that it isn’t salty enough, I place a salt container on the table when we’re eating.

Form a loaf out of the minced meat mass and place it inside your already prepared cooking dish. Put the cut onions around the meat loaf. If you want, you can also add some carrot pieces or even fennel slices. It’s up to you.

Fill the space around the meatloaf with the vegetable or chicken stock and place the dish inside the oven. I usually don’t preheat my oven, so my cooking times are calculated without preheating. Start cooking the meat loaf at around 200 degrees Celsius, top and bottom heat. It will cook for around 1 hour and 20 minutes.

After 15 minutes, take the meat loaf out of the oven and drip the vegetable stock from around it on top of it, to keep it moist and to prevent it from getting a too hard crust. Repeat this process every 15 minutes but be very careful, as it is very hot!

Now, we peel the potatoes and cut them into small cubes. Place the potato cubes inside a bowl filled with water. The bowl should be big enough so that the potato cubes are covered with water. Let them rest inside the water for about 10 minutes. Then dump the water (which also contains the potato starch, that’s why we’re doing it) and rinse the potato cubes with new water. We want to get rid of as much of the starch, as possible, because the starch could cause the potato cubes to stick together in our frying pan and that’s something we absolutely want to avoid.

When there are around 20 minutes left of the cooking time of the meat loaf, fill a frying pan with about 1cm of oil and start frying the potato cubes. Make sure to stir and turn them pretty often so that they won’t stick together and get fried evenly.

While frying the potato cubes, season them according to your taste. I usually use salt, pepper, curry powder and nutmeg.

When the meat loaf is done, serve it sliced with the potato cubes and some of the sauce that developed inside the cooking dish.

I haven’t mentioned any side dish in this recipe but this dish can go along with any type of vegetables. We had some steamed Bok Choy with oyster/garlic sauce but you could also prepare green beans or, what also would be delicious, red cabbage.

Do you prepare your meat loaf differently? What are your preferred side dishes to accompany it? I’m looking forward to read about it in the comments.